(L'Etranger) The Outsider

Camus’ sparse parable about the human condition is one of the great stories of the 20th Century, here adapted for the stage by Booker prize winner Ben Okri. 

A faceless man who can no longer pretend, Mersault commits a senseless murder under the glare of the Algerian sun. On trial he feels distanced from proceedings, he is castigated for not expressing remorse, for not crying at his mother’s funeral, and is forced to confront the hypocrisy and injustice of society. In an age where we are being increasingly told what to feel, The Outsider is a blast of uncompromising honesty.

Albert Camus, French novelist, essayist, philosopher and Nobel laureate, was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road, is one of contemporary literature’s most important writers. This adaption brings them together for a rare dramatisation of one of modern literature’s most celebrated works.

Author Biography

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. In 1942, he published L’Etranger (The Outsider), now one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century. During the Second World War, Camus was active in resistance to the Nazis and directed an underground newspaper entitled Combat. His novels (The Plague, The Fall, A Happy Death, The First Man), essays (The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel), theatre plays (Caligula, The Misunderstanding, The Just Assassins, The State of Siege) and short stories (The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Nuptials, Summer, Exile and the Kingdom) grapple with the themes of absurd, rebellion and love. Considered one of the most significant intellectuals of the twentieth century, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.

Ben Okri OBE is a poet and novelist who plays with post-modern ideas of storytelling and metaphor in his work, describing it as obeying a kind of dream logic. His ten novels, three books of short stories, two collections of essays and three volumes of poems include The Famished Road which won the Booker Prize in 1991, The Age of Magic, Dangerous Love, In Arcadia, Stars of The New Curfew, Astonishing The Gods and Wild. Fellowships include Trinity College Cambridge, Mansfield College Oxford, The Royal Society of Literature and a vice-presidency of the English Centre of International PEN. His many international prizes include the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum and the Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. He wrote the script for the film N: The Madness of Reason. He was born in Nigeria, and lives in London. His latest books are The Magic Lamp: Dreams of our Age and Rise Like Lions: Poetry for the many.